Oregon
Oregon told its state employees to learn how to prompt.
The Enterprise Information Services office rolled out an AI Risk Management Framework aligned with NIST, pre-approved Microsoft Copilot for agency use, and began offering AI training courses in 2025. The stated goal was an informed public-service workforce. The unstated goal was harder.
The unstated goal is that the state of Oregon runs on Tyler Technologies.
The stranglehold
Tyler Technologies is a two-point-one-billion-dollar company whose product is mostly other governments. Forty-two thousand government entities. Hundreds of thousands of municipal workers logged in every morning. The Odyssey court-management system runs every circuit court and the tax court in Oregon. Munis runs ERP for cities. EnerGov runs permitting. Eagle runs land records.
When a reporter in Illinois asked where all the money went, the answer was two hundred and fifty million dollars in Tyler contracts with cost overruns and a court system that still did not work.
The math is not unique to Illinois. The math is the product. Eighty-four percent of Tyler’s revenue is recurring. The renewal rate is ninety-five percent. Those numbers do not describe a software company. They describe a utility, a tax, a toll road.
The data inside Tyler’s systems is public data. Case records. Property records. Permit applications. The things citizens pay taxes to keep. The governments pay Tyler to hold it, and Tyler charges them to get any of it back.
Prompt literacy is not enough
Teaching an Oregon state employee to prompt Copilot does not break the lock.
The employee sits at her desk. The data she needs is inside a Tyler system. Tyler’s system is a black box with an API that is not hers. She can ask Copilot whatever she wants. Copilot will write her a beautiful summary of the data Copilot can see. None of the data Copilot can see is the Tyler data.
Prompt literacy with no access to the data is training on a steering wheel that is not connected to the car.
The access gap is the whole problem.
The move
Agentic coding tools changed one number.
Rewriting a two-point-one-billion-dollar company’s product suite used to be insane. It was insane when dozens of govtech startups tried to take on Tyler and sold out or shut down. The activation energy was a decade of engineering and a hundred million dollars in venture capital before you shipped anything that worked.
The activation energy has collapsed.
An agentic coding environment — the kind of thing Cursor and Claude Code produce in a thirty-minute session — will now scaffold an open-source alternative to Tyler’s simpler products in weeks, not years. A case-management system. A permit-tracking system. A cemetery-records system. A dog-licensing system. Every one of Tyler’s long-tail offerings is a well-defined problem that a small team with agentic tooling can rewrite.
Not the whole suite. Not yet. But the first product. Then the next.
The proposal
A public-good company. Not a startup. Not venture-backed. A non-profit incorporated in Oregon, funded entirely by the contracts it earns and the grants it qualifies for. No investor dollars. No equity. No exits. Local money, local people, local code.
It starts small.
The first contracts are small on both sides. A dog-licensing portal for one city. A park-permit form for another. A cemetery-records tool for a rural county. The kind of job Tyler would quote at two hundred thousand dollars and take nine months to deliver. The non-profit delivers it in six weeks. Billed hourly. At cost.
It hires two populations.
Students. Portland State, University of Oregon, Oregon State, Reed, the community colleges. Paid, full-time or part-time, with real stipends. Not unpaid internships. Paid jobs.
And the software engineers already here who want the work and cannot find it. Every one of them is qualified. Every one of them spent fifteen or twenty years shipping software for companies that then shipped the next round of work overseas. The jobs left Oregon. The talent did not. A civic-tech non-profit with agentic tooling hires the talent back.
The non-profit teaches both groups the same thing — agentic software development. Not how to write code. The seniors already know how. The students who want to write code have Stack Overflow, whose servers share a colo with the disaster-recovery-as-a-service product I built, and GitHub. What agentic development is, in this century, is how to describe a system in plain language, let a pipeline of agents produce a draft, steer the draft, validate it with deterministic testing, and ship. The curriculum is how to supervise a small office of intelligences. A senior with that curriculum and a team of students behind her can ship enterprise code at a cost the state can actually afford.
The two populations sit at the same table. The seniors mentor. The students do the volume. Both get paid.
The team ships small things. Every month, another piece of open-source tooling under an Apache or MIT license. Every month, another Oregon entity on the migration list. Each piece replaces one Tyler long-tail product. Dog licensing. Cemetery records. Park permits. Meeting minutes. Vendor onboarding.
The ten-year arc
Oregon public entities together are estimated to spend two to four hundred million dollars on Tyler Technologies and adjacent govtech over the next decade. At fifty dollars an hour — the blended rate for a team of Oregon students mentored by senior engineers — that is four to eight million engineering hours. Four hundred engineers, paid a real wage, for ten years.
The non-profit does not claim that entire market. The non-profit starts by claiming a cemetery-records tool in a county of twelve thousand people. Then the next. Then the next.
Ten years of small wins is how a funded model gets built. Small contracts on the buy side, hourly work on the labor side, one piece of open-source tooling shipped at a time. By year ten, the open-source stack covers enough of Tyler’s long tail that Oregon can renegotiate every renewal on favorable terms. That is when the alternative becomes a funded model that other states can adopt.
The endgame is a funded, open-source alternative for governments. The startgame is one cemetery.
This is not a fantasy. It is the cheapest version of something the state already pays ten-figure sums for every decade.
The honest part
Rewriting Tyler is not just writing code.
The data migration is the hard part. Tyler will not help. The schema will have to be reverse-engineered. A cooperative exit clause will have to be negotiated up front — because signing a ten-year Tyler renewal is legally binding and Tyler’s lawyers are better at contract than your student engineers are at anything.
The procurement is the second-hard part. State procurement does not know how to buy software from a public-good non-profit run by students. I have managed these contracts — the labor, the billing, the preferred-vendor process. I know the shape of the problem from the inside. That is a regulatory problem with a regulatory solution. The solution requires a state legislature, not an engineering team.
The testing is the third-hard part. Agentic coding is fast but not free of bugs. Anything touching court records or tax records has to be audited, not just tested. A hybrid of deterministic validation and, where needed, professional software auditors.
None of this is free. All of this is cheaper than the status quo.
The pattern
Every chapter of this book is the same move at a different scale.
The address field had one domain owner. Cue had a district manager. The interview had a hundred and fifty thousand applicants. This chapter has the state of Oregon.
Prompt literacy is necessary. It is not sufficient. The access gap is what breaks the pattern. You do not give the person a steering wheel and lock the car. You give them the car.
Open-source the car.
Hire the students who will build it. Pay them. Teach them the pattern. Ship the open-source car into one municipality, then the next. Watch the five-hundred-dollar custom-report fees stop arriving.
The state of Oregon already told its employees to learn how to prompt. The next move is to give them something worth prompting on top of.
I hope other states do this too. Each with their own talent. Each under their own roof. No outside capital. The model is not proprietary. That is the point.